Sweet Honey in the Rock The Women Gather (EarthBeat, 2003)

Sweet Honey in the Rock celebrates their 30th anniversary with this disc, a dozen-and-a-half songs in their trademark style.

Sweet Honey is a women's vocal ensemble that draws from the full range of African-American music -- rhythmic chants, field chants and spirituals, blues, gospel and R&B -- using only their voices and some hand percussion. The group is an outgrowth of The Freedom Singers, part of the civil-rights group called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and reflects in large part the vision of the Reagon family. Sweet Honey's leading voice, Bernice Johnson Reagon, was a founding member of the Freedom Singers, which was formed by her husband, the late Cordell Hull Reagon, in 1962.

The Women Gather also includes the work of the Reagons' daughter, Toshi, an accomplished musician in her own right. She produced this disc, and wrote or co-wrote some of the best songs on this collection, including the moving tribute to her father, "Yes It Was."

Bernice Johnson Reagon includes a personal statement in the liner notes, pointing out that at the age of 60, she has spent half of her life singing with this ensemble.

The current group's five singers (plus a long-time member who translates into American Sign Language at performances) have been together since 1985 or longer; in addition to Reagon, Carol Lynn Maillard is a founding member. You can't make music together for that long without getting very good at what you do, and Sweet Honey is very good. Their every utterance is a celebration of rhythm, harmony and melody, and a testimony to the joy of the human voice raised in song.

That's not to say that I enjoy everything they sing. Some of their social-issue songs come across to me as preachy, their proliferation of words sometimes distracting or just plain awkward in phrasing to my ears. This is true of a couple of tracks on The Women Gather, including Aisha Kahlil's anti-drug song "Prayer at the Crossroads," and Nitanju Bolade Casel's "Give the People Their Rights to Vote!" one of two strident pleas on this CD for Congressional representation for the District of Columbia.

But those few moments out of this music-packed CD are easy to overlook amid the bounty. Where to start? I particularly like the wordless African-style and spiritual-style chants: "Georgia Red Clay II," "Solid Gold," "Nyoka Boka II" and "African Oasis II." Some of the story-songs are particularly moving: "The Voice of the Innocent," a bilingual English/Spanish song, is based on the words of Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman about life under Pinochet; and "Ballad of Harry T. Moore," about the bombing murder of a Florida NAACP leader and his family, from a 1952 poem by Langston Hughes. "Ballad of the Sit-Ins," an old SNCC chant set to an R&B arrangement, is also quite stirring.

"Let us Rise in Love" is a response by Ysaye Maria Barnwell to 9/11 and its aftermath. It sometimes falls into the over-written category, but it makes some important points nonetheless: "Though we're victimized by terror, we're not innocent/Where's the courage to change what we've condoned?"

But most moving to me are Toshi's "Yes It Was," which starts out echoing her confusion and pain at her father's death, and ends in acceptance and peace at the work he did, his legacy, and her memories of him; and Bernice Reagon's arrangement of "That Awful Day Will Surely Come," a hymn she used to hear sung by her minister father and his congregation.

There's a well-known aphorism that says "writing about music is like dancing about architecture," and it holds particularly true for music like this. It's so hard to do justice to the soaring, rhythmic, multi-layered, highly charged music of Sweet Honey in the Rock. It must be heard and experienced.